In the end of 2020, Qualcomm presented its first 5nm chipset in the form of Snapdragon 888. The chipset debuted with the Xiaomi Mi 11 and since then is arriving on many smartphones in the premium flagship segment. The Snapdragon 888 is undoubtedly the king of the Android market in terms of performance, especially when Huawei is almost out of the party. Still, Qualcomm is not satisfied and will present a new, beefed-up version dubbed Snapdragon 888 Plus, or Snapdragon 888+ if you prefer. Today, a mysterious smartphone, appeared on GeekBench with the said chipset.
Releasing Plus versions of its chipsets has become a standard for Qualcomm since the days of the Snapdragon 855. The company unveiled a Snapdragon 855+, and a Snapdragon 865+ so far. Well, you can even say that the Snapdragon 870 is a Snapdragon 865++. Now, the company is moving to unveil the 888+ which will probably be part of the Q3 and Q4 flagship smartphones. With the Galaxy Note series out of the party, and the Pixel 6 Pro coming with an in-house chipset, we are curious to see which smartphone will debut the Snapdragon 888+.
The first Snapdragon 888+ benchmark emerged in Geekbench
Getting back to the point, the first Snapdragon 888 Plus reference device has emerged in Geekbench listing with 6GB of RAM, and Android 11. The new chipset was benchmarked as “Qualcomm Lahaina for ARM64”. The Snapdragon 865 jumped from 2.84GHz to 3.1GHz to become Snapdragon 865+, and 3.2GHz to become Snapdragon 870. However, the Snapdragon 888 will have a minor jump from 2.84Ghz to 3.0GHz. The Adreno 660 GPU in the 888 has 840MHz clock speeds. We assume that it will get a minor clock increment.
The Prime CPU core (Cortex-X1) will be the one with 3GHz, the 3x Performance Cores (Cortex-A78) will have 2.42 clock speeds and the 4x Efficiency CPUs (Cortex-A55) will go up to 1.8GHz. The CPU scores 1,171 points in single-core tests and 3,704 in the multi-core department.
According to some users of Snapdragon 888-powered smartphones, there is a certain thermal issue with this chipset. Nothing like the Snapdragon 810, but still, something that needs to be addressed by Qualcomm or Android OEMs. The SD888+ will certainly have to address this issue, especially with the overclocked core. According to reports, the new Snapdragon 888+ will be introduced sometime in July. Availability, however, will depend on the chip shortage situation.
The OnePlus 9T may be a strong candidate, but it will only reach the market by October or November 2021. Xiaomi may use it on a future flagship, and even Vivo can bring its Vivo X70 series in Q3 or Q4 2021 and use the same chipset. Of course, we expect many leaks to pop out ahead of the Snapdragon 888+ release. So stay tuned.
